My Wordpress website has local news and information on the town in Spain that I live in. The main news page gets updated every day (and sometimes several times a day). Google indexes the new news stories pretty much instantly (which are individual posts on the site), but only indexes the main news page (which shows summaries of the news posts) every week or so.

For example, if you type Nerja News into google (UK) we are number 5 on the results and it says

"6 days ago – NERJA NEWS - Updated Today - Local news, Whats On Now Guide, Weather and accommodation for Nerja and the surrounding area, plus"

If you type one of the news stories into google in quotes, eg "Nerja council´s Department of Popular Traditions have announced that registrations are open for the San Isidro" the page comes up on google within minutes of it being posted.

So my question is, how can I get google to index my main news page more frequently, as obviously if it says "6 days ago" it doesn't look like it has been updated for a week. Have I missed something obvious?

There are two places you can tell Google to return more frequently - one is via your Google webmaster tools account. The other is via commands in your robots.txt file.

Mae_Rose
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2012-04-11T01:28:25Z —
#3

Since you are using Wordpress, you can edit its sitemap.xml. Edit the priority of the main page in order to tell the bots to crawl it frequently.

SandyPodenco
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2012-04-11T14:28:07Z —
#4

Mae_Rose said:

Since you are using Wordpress, you can edit its sitemap.xml. Edit the priority of the main page in order to tell the bots to crawl it frequently.

That might be the problem, it is currently set to daily. I will try fiddling with that to see if I can get it to crawl the page more frequently.

Thanks also to felgall for the other suggestions.

SandyPodenco
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2012-10-28T13:54:09Z —
#5

An update on this for anyone who comes across this thread in the future. I finally solved the problem by changing the update frequency in the sitemap and now every time I update the news pages, I also change the meta description and hit the update button in Wordpress. Google did not pick up on this straightaway - it still took a month or two before google finally accepts that I am in fact updating the page every day.